It's an arms race

via renesys.com

The Renesys blog publicised that Egypt appears to be attempting to "leave the internet" mainly because protesters are using the internet to organise their protests and to avoid tactics used by the police to break the protests. In contrast to the Tunisian protests, where specific routes to Tunisian networks were blocked, nearly all routes to Egyptian networks appear to have been withdrawn from the global routing tables. Essentially this means that nobody outside of Egypt can access networks with Egypt.
This just demonstrates to me that whilst we consider the internet as a large, fairly robust network which will route packets of data from more or less any source to any destination, what it actually is is an infrastructure, owned and operated for the most part by those in power who have the ultimate sanction of just pulling the plug should they see the need. Additionally this network is brittle. It has a number of choke-points which if interrupted will either severely degrade the performance of the network or cut large chunks of it off entirely. In recent years we have seen this occur when undersea cables have been damaged variously cutting off large parts of Western Africa and the middle east.
So what are the defences? There are alternative ways to connect to the internet such as WiFi, cell phones, satellite, and radio. Each has advantages and disadvantages and for the moment, to get an emergency network up and running in a protest zone requires people with good technical skills. Although this presupposes that a network is a necessary part of active protests, communication yes, computer communication? Who knows? If the stakes are sufficiently high then you can, and should, resort to Moscow rules for communication. Then again, rapid communication between protesters allows them to find out about and avoid the tactics used by the security services, for example, finding out about road blocks or Kettling tactics.
So, where to go from here? To me there is an indication that we need more distribution and variety in the infrastructure provision of the internet. We also need to be aware of alternative communication mechanisms that can provide real time communication during emergencies.